Are humans a danger to the earth?

I recently watched a documentary called Home(2009) by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The documentary is about our planet, the earth. It mainly talks about how we humans are destroying the balance of our ecosystem. Our consuming attitude, greediness of corporations and nations, our attitude to go against the laws of nature for comfort are threating the very existence of this beautiful planet. The facts and information in the documentary have changed my thinking, and I thought of sharing my thoughts online.

The movie starts when the life was shaping up in this planet which was burning like furnace. The micro-organisms, the bacterias have consumed/transformed the carbon of atmosphere in various ways, and turned the planet cool to make the life grow further. The carbon has transformed into many things, for example, stones, mountains, minerals and trees. Every single life in the ecosystem has a certain role to maintain its balance. All species follow the rules of nature and co-exist with all other species. All species adopt themselves according to nature. But there is one exception, that is called humans. Humans try to change everything around to make life comfortable. The over-consumption of natural resources by humans has put the existence of all species in danger. Following are some facts which I learned from the documentary. I do not claim the accuracy of any fact, the reader should watch the movie and get the facts verified themselves.

• One natural river in ten no longer flows to sea for several months.
  1. Mighty river Jordan is almost gone, it has been sold in world’s document as fruits and vegetables.
  2. The level of dead see goes down over 1 meter per year.
  3. Las Vegas, which was built on a dessert, is world’s biggest consumer of water. 800-1000 liter of water per person per day.
• Amazon, the largest rain forest, is reduced by 20%. Thanks to our consuming capabilities. Rain forests contain major biodiversity, 3 quarter of world’s total biodiversity.
  1. Forests have been cut to produce soybean.  90% of soybean is used to feed livestocks, that is to produce meat. Which can rather be fed to millions of poor humans.
  2. Deforestation on larger scale  to produce palm oil. It is used as alternative energy, cooking oil, cosmetics, detergents.
  3. Planting eucalyptus on the cost of forests to produce paper pulp. Eucalyptus does not allow other plants to grow and kills the biodiversity.
• Humans are not only dangerous to other species, they are also insensitive towards other humans. There is a huge gap between the rich and poor.
  1. 80% of earth’s natural resources are consumed by 20% of earth’s population.
  2. 500 million people live in desert which is higher than Europe’s whole population.
  3. Half of the world’s wealth is with 1% richest.
  4. Half of the world’s poor live in countries with rich natural resources. I guess this is the effect of globalization.
  5. Nearly 1 billion people go hungry everyday.
  6. Ironically, 50% of grain traded around globe is used to feed live stock, that is, ultimately to feed rich.
  7. 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, and 5000 die everyday due to dirty drinking water.
  8. One in six lives in unhygenic over populated area without basic amenities, like clean water and electricity.
• 1 in 5 humans eat fish as staple diet. Fish extraction has increased 5 fold since 1950, from 18 to 100 million metric ton per year. 3 quarter of total fishing ground is either depleted or in danger of being depleted. Most of the large fishes have vanished at all because there was no time for reproduction.